The College Experience: Basketball · Sports Gambling Podcast Network

Michael Malone Hired As North Carolina Basketball Coach & More Coaching Carousel Moves (Ep. 1152)

April 8, 2026·1 hr 16 min·5 clips

Michael Malone is 449-293 with Nikola Jokic and 61-101 without him.

The episode opens with sponsor chatter and a listener shout-out before the basketball talk takes over. Then Colby swings into the North Carolina job and the Mike Malone buzz. Billy Donovan comes up quickly, and Brad Stevens is mentioned too, with the feeling that Donovan was the more realistic possibility. The hosts say Donovan was not going to leave the Bulls early. That matters because the portal window does not wait for a slow-moving hire, and North Carolina did not seem to jump on anyone in the portal right away. They argue that the timing advantage is muted in college basketball. The roster is smaller, and the transfer market changes how a coach can reshape a team. They contrast that with college football, where the scale of the rebuild and the number of players make the same strategy less workable. The panel keeps circling back to how connected modern college players are to the NBA, which makes an NBA hire feel more plausible at a program like North Carolina. Florida State gets mentioned as a past example in that same conversation. The episode stays loose and conversational. They jump topics, talk over each other, and treat the whole thing like a live group chat. A baseball update sneaks in. Then the coaches-and-portal thread comes right back. The episode ends up less about announcing a winner in the carousel and more about stress-testing the logic behind the move.

As heard by us

A loose coaching-carousel debate that keeps circling back to the question that matters.

North Carolina's coaching search carries this one, and the main question is simple enough: does an NBA hire still move fast enough once the portal is already open?

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Why you'd press play

You want the UNC coaching-rumor churn before everyone else settles on a take, with the noise left in.

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